Well, good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Reed Elsevier's Interim Results Presentation. For all of you who've come, thank you so much for coming, and for those of you who are joining on our webcast, thank you for listening in. I'm pleased to be able to report that in the first half of 2011, we had underlying revenue growth in each of our businesses if, of course, we exclude the net cycling out effect of the biennial exhibitions. Combined with good growth in operating margin, reflecting both a change in business mix and margin improvement in 3 of our businesses, this has resulted in a return to growth in adjusted earnings per share of 5% for both PLC and NV. Reported earnings per share are again strongly ahead, being up 20% in both PLC and NV. And it's also interesting to note that we are now in a position where no restructuring costs were taken as exceptional during the period. Given the resumption of growth in EPS, the board is pleased to be able to recommend an increase in dividends, 5% for PLC and 1% for NV. But that difference, as you know, reflects only movements in the sterling euro exchange rates between the dividend announcement dates. I believe that improved market conditions and the sharp focus, which Erik and his team have brought on value creation and the operational execution should sustain a continued improvement in performance. Mark will now take you through the results, and Erik will then go through the businesses and outlook in more detail.

Thank you, Chairman. Good morning. Well, the first half results reflect the financial progress of Reed Elsevier. We saw underlying revenue growth in each of our businesses, as the Chairman mentioned, excluding the net cycling out of biennial exhibitions, reflecting the improved market environment, new product introduction, expanded sales and marketing and the other actions taken to improve the business. Underlying revenue growth was 1% or 3%, excluding the biennials, and the underlying operating profit growth was 2%. Taking to account net disposals and currency translation effects over weaker U.S. dollar, revenues were 3% lower, both in sterling and in euros. The adjusted operating margin was up 130 basis points at 26.6% and adjusted earnings per share were up 5%, both for Reed Elsevier PLC and Reed Elsevier NV, and also up 5% at constant currencies. As the Chairman mentioned, our reported earnings per share, which include amortization of acquired intangibles, acquisition-related costs, gains and disposal losses and all deferred tax effects were up 20% for each of Reed Elsevier PLC and Reed Elsevier NV. Cash flow was good with 93% conversion of operating profit into cash in the last 12 months to 30 June, and our financial position is strong with net debt-to-EBITDA of 2.4x at 30 June on a pension and lease-adjusted basis. I'm presenting the figures today in sterling. The same charts with the euro figures can be found in the appendices to the presentation. With the average euro sterling exchange rate unchanged between the first half and the comparative period, the growth rates for profit and loss items are, in fact, the same in both sterling and in euros. The first chart sets out the adjusted profit and loss figures with a 3% decline in revenues at the reported sterling exchange rates, a 2% increase in…

Good morning. And again, thank you for coming and for taking the time to be here today. As you already heard from Mark, the first half saw underlying revenue growth in all businesses, excluding biennial show cycling. But perhaps more importantly, we saw improving performance from our large subscription and data businesses across Reed Elsevier, we will look at that in a second. In addition, our more cyclical businesses recovered more firmly than before. And you also saw that our adjusted operating margin was up and that we returned to growth in earnings per share. Elsevier, as expected, has a relatively modest revenue growth of 2% and profit growth of 4% as cost efficiency and process innovation continue to offset new product spend. Science & Technology grew 4%. Research journals saw good growth as global research activity continue to grow in line with long-term historical trends. Global research spend used to run maybe 6% to 8% growth in the early 2000s, mid-2000s, slowed a bit in 2009 and now there are real indications that projections now are really that 10% and 11%. It has now continued to grow and probably back to growing sort of the 4% or something in that range. We've seen new article submissions coming in the high single digits on a 12-month run rate. The last few months, it's even been higher than. Number of articles accepted, articles published growing at the long-term run rate to sort of 4% a year. Number of citations, which is a big indicator also of research activity continues to grow at about 6% a year. So activity levels are very much in line with what you'd expect. The budget environments are very varied by customer, by customer type, by geography, but also by individual customer and their individual situations. However,…

It's Paul Sullivan from Barclays Capital. Three questions. Firstly, just on the -- in terms of your hedging, could you talk about the sustainability of that going through into the second half? And I think you should see a positive benefit also in 2012 looking at the rolling hedge there. Secondly, just on contract renewal within Elsevier, you keep hearing of the odd story of contract renegotiation. But maybe could you quantify the proportion of customers that you've seen actively trying to seek to renegotiate either their packages or their contracts over the last 6 months, if any at all? And then thirdly, second half is usually seasonally stronger. You did 5% earnings growth in the first half. Shouldn't we expect gradual improvement on that in the second half?

Well, I'm going to let Mark cover your first and third question here in a second, but maybe I'll first talk about the contract renewals. The contract renewals happen, as you know, mostly in the second half of the year before the year ended and rolling into the beginning of the year in some countries and some regions. And I think it's very important to note that every customer is different. Every customer situation is very different from the other one because they spend different amounts on research. They see different shape of the research priorities, their funding, and so therefore, they want to allocate their research spending well. That's 99% of their spend and the 1% that goes into things like what we provide, then aligns with the rest. So therefore, every year, we talk to every customer for a long period of time for those that are up for renewal. And we go through and discuss what their priorities are and what their needs are and what their issues are. And every customer is different, and we're not going to comment on any one specific customer in a situation like this. But net-net, what you see in terms of the outcome of those negotiations, the outcome of those contracts is that all the growth rates that you see here, the blended average and that is across industry segments, across funding sources, across geographies, includes corporate customers, include corporate funding of academic libraries, academic research environments and so on, and it all adds up to the blended rate you see here of roughly 4% growth this year. And so, therefore, to answer your specific question, have we seen any specific number, any different this year from a typical year? The answer is no. We went out early when the…

Yes, on the currency hedging, what you're seeing is the weakness of sterling in terms of sort of should increase the profitability of the U.K. originating journal subscriptions, and the weakness of the sterling that happened gets into our hedge rates slowly over time. And so that benefit to our results comes in over time. The same way that you saw in the sort of the mid '00s where the collapse of the dollar worked its way through into our results over a period of time, which had a drag effect on the growth, particularly of Elsevier. So what you saw in the first half was this hedging lag effect had a 4% profit growth improvement effect for the Elsevier business. And, in fact, that was included in the appendix to the presentation on Page -- or Slide 52 showing the margin effect of that. So the hedging effect had a 4% impact in getting from constant to reported growth for the Elsevier division and a 0.9 percentage point pickup in terms of margin. Now the Elsevier business has lower profits in the first half than in the second half because of the seasonality of the business. So the effect for the year as a whole won't be quite as strong as that, but it will persist into the second half. Going into 2012, you will see some additional effect, although it won't be as significant as it has been in 2011. And that's again, if you like the sort of the air going into the balloon as the sort of lowest turn and gets into the hedge rates in the same way the air came out of the balloon as the dollar declined in the sort of early '00s and through the mid '00s. Do you want to continue?

But just in the earnings commentary.

The end is coming through?

You should have successes in the second half, stronger. [indiscernible] in the first half, should we expect around...

Well, I think as we said in the statement, we expect to continue to see gradual improvement in performance. And I think that's about as much numeric guidance as we have given in the statement today.

Polo Tang from UBS. Just have 3 questions. The first one is just on new product launches. Can you give us some indication as to how [indiscernible] specifically SciVerse, but also things like Lexis Advance for Solos and also Lexis Advance for Associates. The second question is really just in terms of Legal & Professional margins. How confident are you that over time those can be improved given our trough levels at the moment? And the third question is really just in terms of Risk Solutions. It's typically been one of your fastest-growing businesses and there was obviously being some issues in terms of enterprise software. But longer term, can we expect the growth to reaccelerate? Can you give us your thoughts on that?

Okay. Let me take each one of those here. New product launches. I mean, as you mentioned a few examples. I'll address those. I mean, SciVerse is changing the environment. It's sort of a platform redesign to change the environment from product, sort of whether you look at it as ScienceDirect as a product for research, for deep research that contains sort of all the full text articles. At the Scopus environment, I was searching across the world of all the scientific materials, the broadest database and everything published in the world. And SciVerse in a way to integrate these into one environment where you can search and build around it and you can build applications and so on. We have had. And that's sort of -- so I see SciVerse as essentially the beginning of a new generation of interacting in terms of how you do scientific research, how you then build applications to build into research, how you search and so on. So SciVerse has gone well as the foundation move that, that is, if you see what I'm saying. Another example is on the science side as we introduced in the last 6 months, SciVal Strata, which is a product on top of the SciVal platform, which is a part of our integrated Scopus data, of course, but built on top of the product called SciVal Strata. That's there for institutions to be able to evaluate performance and history of specific researchers or group of researchers in specific categories to target recruiting and funding decisions and so on around that. So that's a product feature that's put on top of these environments. So I think that's the way you have to see them and they are being rolled out continuously. And I think on a slightly higher…

Do you think it can get back to the historic normal levels of above 20%?

I think at this point, and I think I said this before as well, that we don't like in any of our businesses to set long-term margin targets or margin expectations. By definition, I think if you do that, that becomes your ceiling. And I think in all our businesses, we have some high-margin business, some lower-margin businesses. I think we need to operate with a mindset that our businesses are here to drive value for the customer, that's the #1 priority. Continue to understand how it is we do that and how they make money, how it is they spend money, how we can help them do that. And we need to operate that machinery in a way that would constantly challenge ourselves, our internal cost structure processes and geography to try to see if every year we can try to keep sort of on an annualized regular growth rate basis the cost growth below the revenue growth. And if you have that mindset, I think over time you'll ultimately continue to have better margin production across Reed Elsevier, even though at any given point in time we can actually say trust, remember we [ph] don't set our target. But we think that philosophy is a better operating philosophy because we haven't margin set 13 in some places and over 30 in others. Last question, you said Risk growth. I just want to make sure I understand exactly what you're saying. I think you're saying a long-term growth potential for Risk is what you're really looking at. I'd say it is exactly as we said, as we thought, as we explained in our seminar. If you look across the pie of revenue streams in Risk, we have data and analytics in all the different business segments. Risk, so insurance is, of course, the largest. But then we have other large data and analytics business segments. They're all growing very well right now and they're all returning to a balanced growth across those businesses. Risk's growth this year is not so much dependent on the rebound of screening, which is sort of a temporary rebound. So we think that the fundamental growth potential for Risk data and analytics is exactly what we said before. The fact that we operate a enterprise software business for policy administration to commercial insurance carriers that's installed on a software, so along perpetual license and maintenance basis under a separate brand name there that this year had a few months delay in sort of getting through sort of new software installed and solved does not, in any way, change our growth outlook for the data and analytics business of Risk.

Just a follow-up in terms of the new product launches. Can you maybe just talk about what kind of impact we should expect that to have in terms of revenues for Reed Elsevier. Say, for example, in Legal, what do you see in Legal products, SciVerse in terms of Elsevier?

Yes, I see our pipeline of new product launches as the business that we are in. I don't think here that you see this as something that is different from the business trajectory that we are operating. We have launched new products over the past. I mean, if you go back, you're talking about SciVerse. If you go back 15 years, science journals were essentially printed and shipped through agents. And we've continued to upgrade and redefine the electronic environment all the time and launched products on top and so on. And I think that, that is what sustains a certain growth rate in this business, that you continue to see as your business not to sell a product, but as selling and improved outcome that has economic value to professional customer. And if you continue to identify the professional outcomes that you can sell to and you adjust your solution set to that, then you're going to continue to grow revenues. In Risk, for example, to pick that -- to think about illustrations, we just had a seminar, you saw the layout of, for example, in the insurance workflow. The whole issue of how does an insurance company operate. And from a history, having data in one step in that workflow, you can then take that data and you can build in solution sets that can be used in other steps of the process that you can figure out what it is you build, what you used the data for and how much of an quantifiable impact that has on the customers if they will acquire those products, use those products and use your data more. And that's how you can continue to drive growth rate like that over time, year in and year out because you continue to launch products and do that. So we do not see this pipeline of new product any one you mentioned or any of the others as being sort of the one step change that all of a sudden it's priced differently or drives the new revenue stream at this point. I mean, it may be in some of our businesses at some point we saw that. But we also see, to pick another very simple example, in Exhibitions. We think Exhibitions as an organic growth play. It's an organic growth play where you leverage your skill sets, your capabilities, your brands, your global network, your professional and your technology and your data across the business. And you continue to improve your exhibitions and you continue to launch exhibitions on an ongoing basis. That's how we accelerated the rate, and that drives organic growth. So it's a part of the organic growth equation, but it is not something I would say that new product is going to give this much, and here's how it's going to change Reed Elsevier. Let's go back here in the front and then we go back.

William Packer from Exane BNP Paribas. Three questions, please. Firstly, with Thomson Reuters announcing disposal of its healthcare business and Wolters Kluwer announcing disposal of its pharma business, what are your thoughts regarding your asset mix in Health Sciences? Secondly, can you please provide an update as to how efforts to tap into new budgets in universities through productivity tools have progressed? Specifically, have you seen an increase in uptake in SciVal contracts in H1 '11? And finally, could you please provide an update on the progress of your plans to extend your Risk Solutions business into new geographies? And can you please provide more details on the issues of the software license business within Risk Solutions?

Okay. Let's do each one of these. Thomson Health and Wolters Kluwer Health. Yes, I mean, they all have their reason. Thomson Health, I think, had one description of why it is they are selling their health business. And I think Wolters Kluwer has positioned a partial sale of theirs slightly differently. For our perspective, our health business is an umbrella business for health-oriented, of course, information and solutions. Within that umbrella, we have some very strong content assets and we have some very strong tools of segments and some electronic solutions. We think in the long run that there is an attraction to having a high-quality content, and we think the health markets, in general, will continue to see growth. However, from our perspective, we do see a format transition. This is still a business that is just over 60% print, which means that we are seeing a format transition. And a format transition in any business can have a little bit of a bumpy road. And it is not always that every half year or every year that the revenue growth is exactly sort of aligned with a steady format transition. So we have that still left in some of the health book businesses. And then you have the pharma promotional business that we're in also, which has gone through a very difficult time because of the pharma industry changes, of course. Now if you look at those, some of those you could argue are transformations over a period of time. Some are partly cyclical as well, but some of them are structural. And the way we see it at this point, is that we will continue to work on our health business and continue to reshape the portfolio inside there, and we didn't sell in the past…

Okay. Let me answer both of those. Bloomberg, you said on the legal side, Bloomberg is a very, very big company. They're very good at what they do. We have a lot of respect for them as a company. But I think they've been going at this legal market in different ways for a long period of time. And I think for them to build out a broad-based legal comprehensive information tool to all markets that would rival sort of the large providers, I think it's a large task. They have redesigned their front-end interface and done different things. But when it specifically comes to the pricing issue, there have been a fair amount of comments out there that have said that they were going out with a lower pricing or other things like that. I think what we see from sort of serious industry studies or people who've actually reported or people who have been commenting publicly on the specific situations, they would actually say that they have actually not gone in with something that's a low price solution. If anything, if you do a like-for-like comparison, they're going in at something that is not lower than what you'd see from the other larger providers. Claudio Aspesi - Sanford C. Bernstein & Co., Inc.: Very flat.

Well, there are lots of different ways to define the specific pricing and how it is you -- what you include and how -- who you compare it to and so on. So I don't want to get into any one specific pricing model of the competitors that is not out in the public. But I think the way people are commenting on, it's not quite clear, I think, in public that this is something that's either lower or higher, ultimately end up being flat. The question is how you set your flat pricing, what does it depend on. So I'm not sure that, that is exactly what they are doing or will be doing. On your question about a specific customer, as I said before I don't want to comment on any one specific customer or any one specific situation. All the customers that we work with have very important situations that are unique to them. There are absolutely unique situations in every single customer and they have unique history. They have unique research priorities, unique funding sources, unique timing of contracts and currency and all these other issues that come into it. So I'm not going to go in and comment on any one of them in particular at a time when something is actually going through the process of regular interaction.

Colin Tennant, Nomura. Two things. First, in the legal market and particularly, the U.S. legal market, could you just update us on how you're doing competitively in the sort of legal research market versus the business of law components of that market that you serve? And what the trends are in each of those segments? And the second thing is on more broadly on acquisitions. You've done a little bit of acquisition spend in the first half. The balance sheet looks now like there's headroom appearing there. Could you maybe tell us about your priorities there and remind us of what your acquisition hurdle rates might be?

Yes, U.S. legal, I mean, I think you asked specifically about what you refer to us sort of research side versus business of law? Yes. I mean, there are many different ways to cut sort of what you do in legal and whether it is research or litigation or it's a sort of public records business or whether it is marketing solutions or business and so on. And different companies use slightly different labels. We don't organize exactly the way you label it and other people organize slightly differently. So, I mean, if you look at, in our growth rates, I mean, we don't see fundamentally different trends in our different portions of the legal markets like this. Of course, there's some differences in every half year, but I think that the one situation, just to give you an example, that we used to talk about the whole sort of Web listing, Martindale-Hubbell Web services and someone which was an old print directory, [indiscernible]. We have now sort of gotten back to a situation where that has sort of been rebased and it's sort of stabilized and so on. So therefore, I think at this point, it's not like there any material differences in the overall trends that we see in those markets. The way we look at our participation in them. Of course, if we then take a very, very small sliver and say oh, but what happening in the billing segment, just small law firms, you're going to see lots of variation in the small portion. But if you talk about the big large buckets to us, we don't see materially different trends in the range. We have our strengths and other companies have their strengths. Of course, if you ask another company, they will emphasize their strengths…

It's Vighnesh Padiachy from Goldman Sachs. A couple of questions. Firstly on exhibitions, I mean, you're talking about 40 new launches. How should we be thinking about the margins this year and next year, and the impact of those launches on the overall operating margins? And the second question is, sorry, back to the Legal again, 1% growth in North America. How should we be thinking about that in the second half and in next year? I mean, is the market strong enough to sort of take price increases for some of these new products or should we not be thinking about it that way?

Okay. First question, margins and exhibitions with launches. The run rate of launches last year, I can't remember the exact final number. But let's say last year was in the mid-30s of number of new launches in 2010. This year, let's say it's going to be, for the full year, in the 40s. That is not going to have a material impact on the margin for the overall business for this year versus last year. The bigger question around exhibitions, of course, what is the continuing growth rate organically in the business? So if you see a 10%, then you have the cycling effects, of course, for the full year. So for this year versus last year, I would say the launch differential will not have a big effect by itself. Legal, the growth of 1% so far this year, at this point, that's in line with what I think we see the kind of, what I would describe as sort of a muted recovery in the Legal industry. But it is not a recovery in the Legal industry, I think, has sort of come all the way through in terms of employment hiring and all these different things. There's some conflicting data points for the first half of the year. But they all have one thing in common, and that is that they're not moving very much even though they're slightly different. They're not moving very much. So even though we see increased activity, increase -- somewhat increased demand for law firms and some of those activity levels picking up, the strong hiring and push hasn't really taken off yet. So therefore, if you look into second half, we don't see the world being much different from what it is right now. But if you then start looking to when and what would you see into next year and so on, quite frankly, it's driven a lot by business activity and Legal market activity, maybe even more than driven by what we are doing in it.

It's Mark Braley at Deutsche Bank. Just 2 questions. Mark, you indicated that CapEx in the second half will be a bit higher than the first half. Are we sort of nudging towards 350 on a full year basis rather than 300? And if so, does it stay at that level or does it grow further from that level in the out years? And then on dividend cover. Because of the way currencies move the cover on the euro, dividend over time has sort of slipped a bit, do you want to put a sort of floor on dividend covers so we can think about when you might actually have to freeze the dividend if currency moves the wrong way?

Yes, I mean back in February, I said that our sort of long-term expectation was that CapEx would be round about 5% of revenues with the current portfolio, but that would sort of move around a bit depending on sort of the timing of capital spend. I mean, clearly, with the investment going into new product and infrastructure in the Legal & Professional business at the moment, where we sort of had a bulge coming through, so it's more likely to be 6% this year than 5%. It's 5% in the first half, so that will step up in the second. In terms of dividend color, the dividend color for PLC was 2.2x on the sort of last 12 months to 30 June and 1.9x for NV. Last year, for the calendar year, it was 2.1x for PLC and 1.9x for NV. And that is because of the way that the equalization of the dividends works. There's this imputed tax credit that NV shareholders enjoy. Our stated goal is to maintain at least to 2x dividend cover over the longer term. And so we don't see sort of 1.9x as anything particularly out of sync that needs to be redressed in that with any sort of -- in any short-term environment. Our expectation is that earnings growth continues to gather momentum, and dividends grow as well. But over the longer term, that will come back quite naturally.

It's Giasone Salati from Espirito Santo. Three questions. First, again on the Risk and on your insurance clients, are these the same clients in the Software business are in the Data business spending plus 7 for data and minus 25 or whatever it is for the relative number for software? And secondly, in terms of a bigger-picture strategy, in the past I thought you were leaning towards a preference for a Subscription business. And given that the M&A market is a bit stronger now, we could expect some more movement towards exiting more cyclical business. Is this your idea now or you're very happy with keeping the stronger presence in cyclical? Lastly, on the new products in science, we understand that for the first time, those search engine, under whatever name they go, do include all of the content available for free on the net. Is that correct? And is that a change of strategy, which maybe signals that the open-sources, open archive content is actually becoming more relevant for your clients?

Okay. Let me do the first one here. You said on insurance software clients. They are sometimes the same parent company, right? Because we are essentially selling data and analytics to essentially all insurance companies. So it's often the same parent company, I should say. It's sometimes the same sort of insurance business. But most of this business is, as I said, geared towards commercial carriers. It's end-to-end policy administration software in commercial carriers, often a different department, different function, different set up. And they are not as linked as you might imply by your question. Even though, if you serve a large customer in one way over here, with one division, under one brand name and you serve them in a different way over here with software for this and again a different brand and in a different way, in different business model. We always think of our customers, and we always think about how we create value for them. But they are not like, for example, the linking about sort of SciVal or Spotlight or Strata or something. They're using the same platform and you're using building different tools for the users to do it that way. These are sort of separate business model under separate brands operating, selling different sets of solutions, but to the same parent company as an insurance carrier, often. Second question was our cyclical businesses. I think I've said this before, that some of our cyclical businesses are good, long-term growth businesses that are targeting professionals and their institutions where we cost a small piece of their total cost structure. We're leveraging our tools to have significant important effect on their overall economics. And we believe that the whole model, which is professionalizing and leveraging more technology and data and so on, is…

Sure. I was under the impression that the ScienceDirect and Scopus very rarely in the past included any source which was not part of Reed Elsevier, was not a paying source. In other words, didn't include any open-access source from the Internet, which are all listed under Google Scholar, whilst I understand the SciVal for the first time opens up to open-access sources as well.

Well, I'm not sure that while technically correct, when you say ScienceDirect has always had what we publish. Scopus has always had everything published by everybody else, that is period and quality and sort of real, solid published research index across the world, the largest source for that. Then we have had a very long-running service called Scirus that is operated for a very, very long time, that has indexed the non-full text article period documents such as presentations. If you write a thesis, it would be in there. It would be draft papers. There will be lots of others type of scientific documents and materials that exist in institutional repositories and on the Web in different places that you can link and sort and work with, which actually represent a very large part of the amount of scientific data and materials available. We've now integrated all of these into our different platforms. So there is no fundamental shift in philosophy in any way from Elsevier on this other than we continue to provide a range of tools that help you with looking at and finding and working with scientific research material tools, other types, and to integrate them and link and find them, et cetera. And so we've now slightly changed our integration level of the different tools and so on, and relabeled some of them in integrated platforms, but there's no philosophical difference and no indication that there's anything different to the business model.

Tom Singlehurst from Citigroup. I just have one question actually on STM and the academic journals and the 4% growth. I was just wondering whether you could talk about actually on STM and the academic journals and the 4% growth. I was just wondering whether you could talk about the geographic profile of both because the inference was that 4% should be what we should expect, but I was wondering whether there was any significant divergence between essentially developed markets and emerging markets and therefore, embedded in that inference is a slower growth outlook for developed markets in academic.

Well, the growth is you can aggregate it in many different ways. You can aggregate them by geography of the institution, you can aggregate it by where the research is funded from, by source of research funding, is it government-funded or is it privately funded, which as you know, is not clear. I mean, it's sort of a very large, actually majority of world R&D spend is not government funded. And you have very different ratios in different places, also, the academic institutions. As you probably know, in the U.S., 70% of academic institutions were publicly funded, 30% private. In Japan, it's more 55-45. Japan's our second largest market. You look at many other countries, they're more like 90-10. So it's funding source, it is geography of the research conducted, it's geography of the research funding. These are all -- and it's the source, the type. We also have corporate customers, corporate research funders a large part as I said. So there are lots of different sizes you can take. And, of course, you can take -- you can come up with an example. You can pick a country today that is in a difficult economic situation and slow economic growth and therefore, where they're not sort of increasing some of these spend levels, and they're currently going through a little bit of a dip, you can also find institutions in some of those same locations that had a dip 2 years ago, even 3 years ago now, that have taken down their spend in their views and now are growing rapidly again. Even though they can't sit right next to each other geographically, they can have very different funding profiles and very different strategies and try to do different things to the research. So it's not so clear that…

Patrick Wellington at Morgan Stanley. A couple of questions. Firstly, on Legal, while we hear what you said about the market environment not being great, I think it has become a bit more apparent over recent quarters that your peer group, whether it's Thomson Reuters or even Wolters Kluwer, going a bit faster in the -- some of the survey data suggest that the Legal markets may be picking up a bit faster than Reed. So what do you think about that? And secondly, just going back to the question about earnings growth, for management to get paid, you need to do 9% compound earnings growth over this year and next year, you've done 5% of the half year, you didn't seem that enthusiastic about a bigger pickup in the second half. Have you given up on the 9% compound target for the next 2 years?

Okay. The first one here, the Legal market. If you look at the Legal survey data, some of them say that Legal hiring this year has been flat, some of them say it's up a little bit, some even say it's down a little bit. So if you look at actual hiring and you look at sort of employment in large law firms, it's pretty muted. If you look at activity levels in terms of business activity, if you look at some of Legal sort of demand and those kind of things, they are picking up faster. And that's why I say that our new sales are up significantly, continuing to grow strongly and our usage is up firmly. So therefore, I say we are seeing that activity level pick up. Now even if you've seen a pickup in those things, it's not clear always that, that directly links to the revenue recognized in that time period because of contract periods, the contract subscriptions, we had a decline over a couple of years and you renew contracts over a couple of years and so on. So you see contract renewals coming through and bundling in print or transaction processing. So it's not the online spend that's relevant, it's the total spend you get from a firm that's relevant, right, from all these different sources. And some of those have rolled through as the economy slowed down and law firms slowed down. So even if you see it pick up right now, you then have, like we have in many of our subscription markets, the long-term contracts sort of delay effect and so on. So that's why I'm saying if you see -- will you see a quick rebound in any of our legal markets at any given point in time,…

Paul Gooden from RBS. A couple of questions sort of related to next year. Can you just remind us, what is the cycling in effect next year? Is it just a reversal of the, I think, 8% or 10% you're suffering this year or are there other quadrennials that come in? Second, it seems there's a spate of product launches at the moment. Do you think that pace will be maintained next year or do you think it'll come off a little bit? And then on journal pricing, appreciate it's a little bit early, but do you think it's appropriate to put through inflationary price increases next year or would that be aggressive in the austerity environment?

Show cycling. We have a page in the back that shows the history of show cycling by year, and if Mark helps me, tell me exactly which page it is.

Page 53. Slide 53.

It has the historic of show cycling. For the full year, I think the cycling effect has sort of varied from 7 to 11. Is that what it shows? If I'm remembering correctly. So if you say, on average, the show cycling is more like what you said sort of 8, 9, 10 points, of course, it varies because there are some triennials in there by 1 point or 2 points, but there's much more variation in the success of the shows and the economic growth drivers in the industry than when you get that last 1 point right on the triennial. So if you think that the pattern is on average, what that sheet says, and you take the average of those, I think you're going to estimate cycling pretty close and pretty accurately.

Maybe worth just adding, the 14% effect you can see on the first half will be more muted for the year as a whole and there is next cycling out also in the second half. But what you saw in the first half was the particularly large [indiscernible] show that took place in the first half of 2010 didn't happen. In the second half, we have the [indiscernible] show, which last took place in 2009 coming in. So actually it's -- the cycling effects are uneven in the halves.

But that's a regular pattern. Every year, the cycling effects are bigger in the first half than the second half as it happens. So every other year it's in, every other year it's out. But the full year numbers that I think you're asking are so, so you can look at it from that trend. Second question was the activity level on product launches. The way I interpret what you're saying is you look across Reed Elsevier. I don't look at it as a temporary burst of new products. I look at it as perhaps a slightly higher level than we would have seen if you look back a little bit. But it's not a material change in philosophy or approach, and it's not a burst. It is something that we expect to stay very active on sort of product innovation and launches consistent with the theme around, we are here to drive organic growth in the business over a long period of time. And to do that, you need to therefore, create value for your professional customers and keep innovating and delivering new products, tools and sets around that. And also keep operating and integrating platforms to make sure that they stay ahead of what your customers actually get value from. So but there will be some fluctuations in and out as you have sort of new platform redesigns in on business versus another. So, of course, they'll even look like there's some lumpiness to it, but it's not a temporary burst. Last question was on pricing. Well, as you, I think, know, the business in Science has really changed over the last 10, 15 years from being sort of a business where you subscribe to a journal and have a price to a business where essentially less than…

It's Richard Menzies-Gow from Merrill Lynch. Just 2 quick follow-ons, please. I just wonder on exhibitions whether you can give us a flavor of those annual shows held already this year, just in terms of the forward-looking trends for next year. I know whether -- I know there's always timing differences, but whether you can just give us a flavor of sort of mid-single, high-single digit, what's the range that might be looking year-on-year? And then just to clarify on the 4% Science organic growth. I know Informer have mentioned that there was some phasing benefits in their half year numbers. So just to sort of clarify whether that 4% benefit, it's all you think from any sort of particular sort of phasing or timing of renewals?

Forward bookings, I know that some companies are very precise in forward bookings and mention numbers very explicitly. We don't disclose specific numbers of forward booking because we manage and we track, literally, day-by-day, week-by-week forward booking curve, and there are lots of different types of bookings. There are reservations. There are firm book and there's spend. There are volume. There are changes. So there are lots of different issues here, and we have very sophisticated sort of curve models that do all of these. And in the end, the thing that really drives the revenues is how do they behave in the last few months and weeks coming up towards the show, because that's when the curve is -- how is the curve trending? Are you in a place where people are falling off and canceling out or in a trend where they're accelerating and so on? So they are not as meaningful as I think we would all like them to be so it'd be easier to predict. But if you say the run rates that we have right now, if you to try to say in average of what are we seeing right now? I would put it in the category of sort of, broadly speaking, high-single digits, mid- to high-single digits. If you see what I'm saying. It's that kind of a like-for-like, show-by-show type of thing. But that's a broad average here now. You're talking, you're averaging shows that this year we see China, Brazil, and so on, Russia, several other places growing 20-plus percent, and others growing in the single digits, right? So you're averaging now, and I'm not sure that I would take it as a big indicator in any way. I think we can tell you a lot more as we get later into the year about what we're seeing going forward. I wouldn't take it now as any real prediction of next year.

Sorry, and just on the academic?

Sorry. I missed that one, I'm sorry. The 4%, is there any phasing in Science & Technology for the first half of the year, right? Well, as far as we can see, there is no phasing anomaly in the first half right now. I mean, we do have some businesses there, as you know, that are referenced in individual purchases that can be purchased anytime during the year, and some of our reference educational things have publishing timing. We also have some things that are sort of one-off purchases of databases and backfalls and things like that, that tend to come in different parts of the year. But if you look at what happened in the first half and is this an accurate reflection of what happened in the first half, I'd say, yes, we haven't -- I haven't identified anything in the first half that wasn't representative.

[indiscernible] KBC Securities. One question on the Exhibition business. The margin declined by almost 40 basis points. Could you talk a bit through the reasons for this decline and the share of the reason in the full year-on-year decline?

Yes, I think the primary issue here is cycling, because you're comparing, right? I mean, I just want to make sure you're looking at last year first half margins to this year first half margins. Yes, the margins in the first half, because of cycling, are significantly higher than the full year margins. But because you have cycling in and cycling out, the cost declines don't come as fully as the cycling out revenue declines, because you still operate business and so on in the cycling out years. So it's almost exclusively an issue of the cost effects of cycling versus the revenue effects of cycling. I don't have any specific reason to say that our margins fundamentally behaving any differently now than they were a year ago if you try to do a like-for-like basis. No. Okay, well, thank you very much for coming and for taking the time to be here today.